The Complete Guide to POV Begins

First person singular past tense

We start with perhaps the most natural point of view — if anything to do with human language can really be called natural.

I went, I saw, I thought.

This is how lots of people speak.

If you tell someone what you did yesterday, you’re likely to speak like this.

Yeah, I had a pretty lazy day —I went down the town, had a coffee. I bought a couple of books in Oxfam.

There are exceptions to this. Definitely not everyone speaks this way. I mean with, ahem, grammatically ‘correct’ verb forms. For example, there’s what I call the footballer POV, which is when the past is related in the present continuous:

So I’m running down the left wing and Giggsy’s cutting in from the right, and then it’s all suddenly opening up in front of me

But even footballers — except in comedy sketch shows — don’t use this to describe a trip to see the doctor.

So I’m pulling down my trousers and he’s taking notes on his computer and asking me questions and I’m wondering when he’s gonna look…

Some Englishes don’t modify verb forms in the past tense. They use go instead of went and see instead of saw. In most cases, the speaker will have conveyed that they’re describing past events.

Like, yesterday, I go round my brothers and bring him some ham and cheese. I see through the window — well, that’s the last person I wanna see…

However, even when a writer has a fairly conversational style, the first person past tense employed in fiction isn’t the same as actual speech. It is more informative. It is doing more narrative work in a way that may be obvious but which we accept when it’s on the page. If someone spoke like this in the pub, we’d think they were being a bit rich.

Here’s Teju Cole’s narrator in Open City:

I greeted the doorman in the dark, low-ceilinged foyer and took the elevator to the third floor. When I entered the apartment, Professor Saito called out. He was seated at the far end of the room, near large windows, and he beckoned me over to the chair in front of him. His eyes were weak, but his hearing had remained as sharp as when I had first met him, back when he was a mere seventy-seven. Now, bunched up in a soft, large chair, swaddled in blankets, he looked like someone who had gone deep into the second infancy.

This is almost all in the simple past tense, ‘I greeted… I entered….’ but it flicks into an extension of this, the past perfect, ‘his hearing had remained… when I had met him’, with imperceptible grace. Then just as easily it returns to the simple past, ‘he looked’.

So we get the past moment, a bit further back, and then the past moment again.

The more conventional POVs — first person past and third person past — are very flexible in this way. They recess the characters and what happens to them a little way off in time, but as long as this isn’t made an issue of we soon start to become engrossed in an account of events that may as well be in the present.

In some ways, it’s easier to find examples of this modulation between simple past and past perfect than stories that just stick with simple past. Paragraphs entirely in the simple past have a tendency to feel flat — as if the narrator is stuck in a very one-dimensional present moment — and the best of them make a virtue of this.

Here’s the opening of ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’ by Raymond Carver:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything. But I heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

There are opportunities here to vary the past into the past perfect. For example:

I tried to wake Cliff who’d been passed out since who knows.

But these variations are refused. This insistent directness is part of why minimal prose is minimal. Subclauses and unusual vocabulary are also avoided. To a minimalist, a tense like the past perfect continuous is a bit affected, perhaps a bit European and Marcel Proust-y.

I had been trying to wake Cliff for a couple of minutes before I gave up.

Would Carver’s character speak or think like this? Carver (or his editor Gordon Lish) doesn’t believe so. Then, goes his logic, don’t write about them in a way that belittles or satirises them.

However, these are literary choices, and minimalism is a literary style.

In summary:

First person singular past tense.

Likely upsides:

Flexible, unobtrusive, second nature, intimate.

Possible downsides

Flat, monotonous, predictable, faux naïf.